南市公共体育场

Nanshi Public Stadium stands at 208 Daji Road, at the corner of Fangxie Road and Daji Road in the Laoximen area of Huangpu District. It was the first public sports ground built by Chinese citizens and is now the campus of Shanghai Huangpu School. In 1915 the Shanghai county magistrate asked Wu Xin, head of the county education association, to establish a public ground; a 26-mu triangular plot was leased outside the old West Gate and the stadium opened on 30 March 1917 as Ximen Public Stadium, with a 300-metre track, football pitch, tennis and volleyball courts, an indoor basketball court and a gymnasium. The site became a stage for both sport and public assembly. On 7 May 1919 more than 20,000 Shanghai residents gathered here in support of the May Fourth Movement, and after the May Thirtieth Incident a city meeting of some 200,000 people was held on 11 June 1925. The ground was taken over by the municipality in 1928 and renamed Shanghai Municipal First Public Stadium, later Nanshi Public Stadium. It was destroyed during the Japanese bombing of 1937 and used as barracks and storage; it was rebuilt in 1946 with a 350-metre track, a football pitch and wooden stands for about 3,000 spectators. In 1958 the stands were rebuilt in concrete and capacity rose to 5,000, and in 1983 it was one of the football venues of the Fifth National Games. After further reconstruction it reopened in 1997 as the Shanghai Hunan (south Shanghai) Sports Activity Centre. It was listed as a Shanghai revolutionary memorial site in 1977 and as a municipal cultural relic in 2014. The school playground still keeps the site in sporting use, making it one of the most layered records of Shanghai's urban sports history.